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We are delighted to announce that we will be offering The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results once again, from September 3 – December 17, 2017. This is a 15-week course for practitioners who are in the weeds of development and actually want to learn how to do PDIA. In this course you will have the opportunity…

<update> These courses are closed. You can read about what we learned from this iteration here. We are delighted to announce that we will be offering our free PDIA online course once again. This is our third iteration of the course and we will use the recently published “Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action” book as the…

By Salimah Samji We are delighted to inform you that our PDIA book entitled, “Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action” was just published by Oxford University Press. The book presents an evidence-based analysis of development failures and explains how capability traps emerge and persist. It is not just a critique, it also offers a way of doing…

By Greg Power Anyone who has had a serious bout of food poisoning will be familiar with the experience of going to see a doctor when you think you are dying, then having to provide a ‘sample’ that is sent off for analysis, only to receive a letter from the hospital two weeks later –…

By Duncan Green The DDD crew reassembled in London, two years on from the Harvard meeting that really got the ball rolling. Unfortunately I could only attend the first session and the next day’s post mortem, so other participants, please feel free to add your own impressions/put me right. DDD is evolving fast into something approaching a big tent…

On 17 November 2016, ODI, in collaboration with the Building State Capability program at Harvard University, convened a private workshop bringing together a number of actors from academia, civil society, and donors, to look at how the adaptive development agenda has been put into practice throughout the world. We attempted to draw out some lessons…

by Tom Orrell “‘All right’, said Deep Thought. ‘The Answer to the Great Question…’ ‘Yes..!’ ‘Of Life, the Universe and Everything…’ said Deep Thought. ‘Yes..!’ ‘Is…’ ‘Yes..!!!…?’ ‘Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm”. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Devoid of context, numbers have no meaning; that’s the message that the…

by Matt Andrews It is nearly two years since we at the Building State Capability (BSC) program combined with various other groups across the developing world to create an umbrella movement called Doing Development Differently (DDD). The new acronym was meant to provide a convening body for all those entities and people trying to use new methods to achieve…

Would you like a how-to guide to make your organization more effective? We recently experimented with online education as a modality to diffuse the essence of PDIA with the long term objective of creating a global community of practice that collaborates, learns, shares and grows together, ultimately leading to more successful development outcomes. Watch the…

By Helen Derbyshire, Julian Barr and Steve Fraser Lots of development programmes and organisations are grappling with the challenge of how to be more effective by being more adaptive. How do we modify our usual ways of working to better influence and learn from complex processes of change in uncertain and constantly changing contexts? How…

by Salimah Samji The broad principles that underpin the PDIA approach to building state capability are gaining traction in development and policy circles. We recently experimented with an online course as a modality to diffuse the essence of PDIA with the long term objective of creating a global community of practice that collaborates, learns, shares…

By Tom Kirk Lisa Denny and Pilar Domingo at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) recently produced a timely short report on the future of security and justice programming. On the one hand, it responds to a growing movement among development practitioners to seriously consider how political economy analysis (PEA) and problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) approaches…

By Simon White y Simon White on February 24, 2016 There is a high degree of innovation happening in how donor and development agencies promote entrepreneurship and private sector development (PSD) in developing countries. Where once donors and developing country governments provided finance, training and other services directly to nascent enterprises, they now focus on…

By Duncan Green One of the criticisms of the big picture discussion on governance that’s been going on in networks such as Doing Development Differently and Thinking and Working Politically is that it’s all very helicopter-ish. ‘What do I do differently on Monday morning?’, comes the frustrated cry of the practitioner. Now some really useful…

By Arnaldo Pellini and Nicola Nixon ‘Partnership’ is a buzzword in international aid and development. But, arguably, it’s often overused and tokenistic. So how can we create real partnerships that lead to better development outcomes? Most of the discourse on Doing Development Differently (DDD) focuses on the relationship between program teams and beneficiaries, yet also…